An SEO audit helps you understand the root causes of your site’s poor search engine rankings and identify strategies for improvement. It also provides insight into the underlying issues slowing down your site’s performance and affecting user experience.
Performing an audit before and after a major website project, such as redesign or migration, can help avoid unexpected SEO problems.
Crawlability
Crawlability is one of the most important topics to focus on during a technical SEO audit. It helps ensure search bots can index your client’s web pages and give them the proper attention they need for organic SEO.
When a web crawler (also known as a robot or spider) discovers a website, it renders it, reads the content, and then saves it to its index. It is a crucial part of Google’s algorithm and essential for any site wanting to attract organic traffic.
You generally want your site to be easy for a crawler to navigate and understand. It can be achieved by ensuring your navigation is well-structured and follows an intuitive pattern.
Your site’s navigation should include several internal links which help a crawler connect the various parts of your site. You should also consider your URLs and make sure they describe each page adequately.
Indexation
You must ensure all your client’s pages are indexed during the SEO audit process. Search engine robots can access them to find content and rank it in search results.
Indexation serves several different purposes, but two, in particular, can be particularly helpful. First, it can maintain a stable relative price between two goods or services.
Second, it can maintain a stable real price of a good or service concerning a currency unit’s purchasing power. Third, it can reduce the tax liability of an individual or business by ensuring that the price at which an asset is sold matches its value to the market.
One of the most vital things to remember during a technical SEO audit with automated tools is that Google has a finite amount of time it’s willing to spend crawling your site. Therefore, if your client’s website needs to be indexed correctly, this can significantly impact their rankings.
Crawl errors
Crawl errors occur when search engines cannot crawl or index a web page. They appear for various reasons, including server issues, CMS failures, and URL structure changes.
Google separates these issues into two categories: Site Errors and UR Errors. The former are issues that affect your entire website and should be addressed, while the latter is specific to a single page.
Similarly, you’ll want to check your URLs regularly during an audit and ensure they’re all accessible for Googlebot to crawl. If your URLs are long or don’t describe what they lead to, it can negatively impact your SEO.
Another issue you’ll want to address is DNS errors, which can prevent Googlebot from accessing your site. These are typically temporary, so fixing them quickly is best.
Crawl time
Crawl time is a Google metric that reflects how many kilobytes are downloaded by search engine bots during indexation. This number is affected by site size, page latency, image and media file sizes, page load times, adbots, and more.
In a perfect world, Google would prioritize crawling URLs that are highly relevant and useful to the end user. That’s why it won’t crawl duplicate content, internal search result pages, tag pages, or any other page that isn’t providing value to the user.
As a result, it’s often advisable to keep your site up-to-date with new and relevant content. It helps boost SEO and keeps your content fresh for Google to find and re-crawl regularly.
However, it’s also important to remember that Google’s crawl rate statistics are often erratic from one day to the next. Therefore, a sudden increase or decrease in crawling can lead to unexpected fluctuations in your site’s rankings.
